Christina McPhee: Listening

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Friday, Oct 7, 2022  5pm - 9pm

Location

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Details

Christina McPhee
Listening

Solo Exhibition

October 7 - November 18, 2022
Opening reception Friday, October 7

Osos Contemporary
967 OSOS ST
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA 93401-3212

Instagram: @ososcontemporary

Website: www.ososcontemporary.com

Contact: ososcontemporary@gmail.com

“Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” — Pauline Oliveros, on Deep Listening.

Osos Contemporary presents eight paintings and an extended ambient video grounded in the practice of deep listening. Drawing through sound, ambient, spoken word, and music, Christina McPhee follows her ears. In and around studio-time, listening is alchemy. Painting dispatches notes from the field, recording notations and scoring ear worms, footfalls, beats, mapping, zine scraps, texts, and sites. As social abstractions, the paintings intimate politics and aesthetics with dry humor, the volatile charm of camp, and queer swerves into near-figuration and spirituality. Language, scoring, and the memory of song identify data points in large scale map-like compositions. A three hour long playlist, accessible online through Apple Music, is live in the gallery. Ambient sound interfaces at random to a new silent film, screening on loop. Each painting pairs to an interactive QR code, which when scanned leads to audio files to a poem or lyric that influenced the work’s development in the studio.

“One gets the sense that the image conjured up is all at once a particular, individual, material composite (colored ink, graphite, paper, the skills of a hand) and a precarious, temporary, expression of forces for which no adequate, human- readable language exists. The question of drawing’s mobilities is thus a question of expressive sympathy, imitation and belief in some kind of connection or association to other mobilities, however fraught or tentative.” – Ina Blom

Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of shadowing figures and contingent effects. Her dynamic, performative, physical engagement with materials is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making. Recent paintings, videos, and drawings engage landscape as palimpsests of geologic and cultural memory. She uses techniques of multiplicity, doubling, mirroring, shattering, editing, erasing, cropping and ghosting to explore vitality, loss, and regeneration.

Christina McPhee’s work across video, drawing, photomontage and painting has shown in museum exhibitions at the American University Museum-Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; and at Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. Among museum collections of her work are the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center for Photography, and Rhizome Artbase/New Museum, in New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Colorado Springs Art Museum at Colorado College; Sheldon Art Museum and the Great Plains Art Museum at University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum at Washington State University. KinoSaito Art Center, Verplanck, New York (Hudson Valley) hosted her first survey solo show of recent work in drawing, painting and video in New York, March-April 2022, curated by Beth Venn. McPhee has recently shown in two-person exhibitions with Left Field Gallery (with TL Solien) and Patricia Sweetow (with Toshiaki Noda) in California (2021). Other notable group shows include Otherwise/Revival at Bridge Projects Los Angeles (2021); and forthcoming with Beta Epochs, curated by Madeleine Ignon and Alex Lukas, in downtown Los Angeles (October-November 2022). Carbon Song Cycle, a collaborative video/chamber music created by Pamela Z and Christina McPhee, will be in revival in a new production for the Exploratorium, San Francisco, in 2023.

www.christinamcphee.com